Advise and Repent - What some Senators learned from Tom DeLay.

OpinionJournal.com ^ | July 29, 2007 | Editorial Staff

[gpapa]

Welcome to Arlen Specter, the B side. One week after standing up for the nomination of Judge Leslie Southwick, a Bush appeals court nominee being stonewalled by Democrats, the mercurial Republican from Philadelphia has come up with a strange new quest.

On Tuesday, the Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican announced his plans to "review" the confirmation hearing testimony of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito to see how it matches their decisions on the bench. "There are things he has said, and I want to see how well he has complied with it," Senator Specter said of the Chief Justice, according to The Politico Web site.

They must be falling over at the American Bar Association. It's widely agreed that it would be unseemly and improper for a nominee to seek confirmation to the nation's highest Court by promising Senators how he or she would rule on a given issue on the bench. Yet Mr. Specter's statement suggests that he thinks he pocketed such promises from Justices Alito and Roberts, and he now wants to check to see if they've been kept.

[LiteKeeper]

Specter, the Imperial Senator, Traitor

[Stayfree]

Arlen Sphincter routinely sticks his head up his @ss to review his hidden agenda, but in doing so only reveals what a total @ss he is...how could you trust this moron to run a dog kennel, much less consider what is important to 300 million people!

[mkjessup]

Memo to GWB:

This is the thanks you get for supporting your fellow RINO back in ‘04.

Enjoy the ride.

[patj]

From the article: Stranger still, Mr. Specter says he was inspired by a recent meeting with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in Aspen. The Clinton appointee made clear in his dissents last year that he disagrees with the direction of the Roberts Court. But Mr. Specter reported that Justice Breyer told him in Aspen that "there were eight" cases in which the Court had either overturned or undermined earlier precedents. We hope Justice Breyer isn't kibbitzing the Senate to inquire into why his views haven't prevailed with a majority of his colleagues on the Court. We'll wait for more explanation from Mr. Specter, but he's wading into questionable separation-of-powers territory here.

Puting aside the obvious interference of Breyer, since when did overturning precedent become a bad thing? Isn't that what Roe v Wade did? I know that there must be countless other cases that overturned precedent. Is it only investigated if a conservative does it? Never mind, don't answer that.

[bilhosty]

And this guy wants to be renominated in ‘10.